


then i'll sing you to sleep

by unrulyangels



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pining, Post-Season/Series 01, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:35:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28147686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrulyangels/pseuds/unrulyangels
Summary: The night they finally play the Orpheum--the night that Julie saves their afterlives--is the first night that Reggie, Luke, and Alex reach for the couch that Julie’d claimed would turn into a bed the night that they had met her.
Relationships: Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 126
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	then i'll sing you to sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [finkpishnets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/finkpishnets/gifts).



> I just think you're really neat, finkpishnets!
> 
> (Title from Maggie Rogers' "Dog Years.")

The night they finally play the Orpheum--the night that Julie saves their afterlives--is the first night that Reggie, Luke, and Alex reach for the couch that Julie’d claimed would turn into a bed the night that they had met her.

They haven't needed to before--they haven’t been sleeping, have been spending most of their nights sinking pebbles into the Pacific Ocean instead--but between Caleb and the Orpheum and almost disintegrating and then not, they’re exhausted; or Reggie is, anyway.

He pulls the couch's cushions off and then watches, for a few minutes, as Luke and Alex fiddle with its underframe before flinging himself onto one side of the thin mattress they've unfurled. He thinks he hears one of the others sigh, but he is so tired that whoever it was could--literally, actually--fall asleep on top of him and he'd likely not even register it.

There is a stretch of silence, then, before someone switches the lights off and someone else settles on the other side of the mattress, the bed dipping beneath their weight.

Reggie figures, a little absent-mindedly, that it is probably Alex beside him, Luke off to starfish across his old couch, but when he lifts his head off the mattress, he sees that he is wrong: it is Luke lying next to him, his face pointed toward the ceiling; unusually stationary, immobile. He is so still that Reggie thinks he must have fallen asleep, but then--right as he lets his own eyelids fall--Luke reaches across the mattress and rests his fingertips against Reggie’s forearm.

“Hey,” Luke whispers, as Reggie’s fingers twitch involuntarily. “You were singing with Julie tonight.”

The remark is so unexpected, and so inane, that Reggie’s fingers still, and he can’t help but snort. “We were all singing with Julie tonight,” he says, turning toward Luke and knocking on his forehead gently.

“No,” Luke says softly. “No. I mean--you sang into her mic.”

Reggie blinks, the fog of sleep that had been hovering about his mind receding. Luke isn’t looking at him--he still has his eyes trained on the chairs strapped to the ceiling--and Reggie is terrified, suddenly, that he has crossed some sort of boundary without even knowing it. “Yeah. Julie’s great,” he whispers intently, “but, like, a great friend, you know.”

A beat. Another. Another. Reggie is in the middle of wishing that Luke would just turn over and look at him when he finally does.

“You didn’t sing with me tonight,” Luke says, his eyes burning strangely in the dark. “You didn’t share a mic with me.”

It is an odd thing to say, and the Reggie of a few days ago would have laughed Luke off, or else accused him of being jealous, but the Reggie of today--the Reggie of right now--feels his throat swell up at the thought of teasing Luke. (He wishes, abruptly, that he’d claimed Luke’s old couch for himself--and isn’t that a strange thought?) “You were on the other side of the stage,” he whispers in response, focusing his eyes on a spot over Luke’s shoulder. “Julie was closer. Easier to reach.”

“Yeah,” Luke sighs, tossing back onto his back.

He is quiet for a few minutes, so quiet that Reggie figures he must have drifted off to sleep--even though Reggie himself suddenly feels the anxious, jittery way he used to feel after he’d drunk three bottles of Coke in a row--when Luke starts whispering to him again.

“And what about the night we performed here?” Luke says, gesturing toward the studio’s doors. “You didn’t sing with me then, either, though you did sing with Julie.”

It doesn’t sound like an accusation, exactly, but it does sound like something, so Reggie hurries to explain, his throat feeling oddly tight again: “It wasn’t about Julie, Luke. The piano--the piano was just in the way.”

“You could’ve walked through the piano,” Luke says, something inscrutable in his voice.

Reggie blinks. “Did you want me to walk through the piano?” he asks, instead of the question--“Well, sure, but why?”--that has started chirping at the front of his mind or the one--“Did you know that I’ve been thinking about your mouth for days, Luke?”--that has started clattering at the back of it.

Luke doesn’t answer him, and Reggie is relieved--even though he is suddenly frantically keen, also, to know the answer--because he thinks that that might actually be the end of it; that he might get to go to sleep and then wake up pretending that he had never had this conversation with Luke at all.

But: “I’m still your favourite, right?” Luke whispers, so soft that Reggie would figure it wasn’t a question at all, save for how Luke is looking at him in that intense way that probably makes Julie like him so much. That makes everyone like him so much.

“You’ll always be my favourite,” Reggie says immediately, because he doesn’t have to think about it--and because it’s true. He's wondering, vaguely, if he'd responded a little too quickly--and wondering, also, when he started worrying about such things around Luke--when he sees the whites of Luke’s teeth glinting in the dark.

Yes, good, he reasons, a swell of relief breaking against his skin, when he feels the mattress shift beneath his stomach. Then: No, wait, he thinks, as Luke hurls himself toward Reggie, hooking one of his arms around Reggie’s shoulders and pressing the line of his body to the line of Reggie’s.

“Okay,” Luke whispers, and Reggie swears that he can feel his oldest friend grinning against the skin at his cheek.

He is grateful for the dark, suddenly; grateful that Luke can’t see how weirdly red his cheeks have gotten. “Okay,” he echoes, and if it sounds a little strangled, then that’s--something, but it’s not the first time, either.

(“Okay,” he thinks he hears Alex mutter from across the room in a resigned sort of way--but he is so distracted that he figures it's just as likely that it was only a tree branch or drift of wind whispering against a window.)

**Author's Note:**

> ♡


End file.
